A “walking” book, when I finished My Two Worlds I wrote, “It’s meandering (obviously), sometimes feels pointless (deliberately), and takes longer than one would expect to go a such a short distance (which works perfectly with the book’s plot).”  It’s a slow-burner, but in the time since I finished it has only grown in my esteem.  My Two Worlds is only just over 100 pages, but it took me some time to read because of the many layers and switch-backs not just in the global structure of the book but also in each sentence.  The translation is a marvel. 

Q: How long have you been translating, and what are some of your prior translating projects?

A: For about twenty years off and on, mostly short stories, poetry and plays from Latin America.  Before translating My Two Worlds, I translated a little-known novel by the 19th-century Mexican author José Tomás de Cuéllar for Oxford University Press (The Magic Lantern, 2000).  I’ve also translated poetry by the Argentine poet, Mercedes Roffé, which is mostly published on-line or in chapbooks.  For a few years I seemed to be only translating Cubans — Virgilio Piñera’s play Electra Garrigó, poetry by Nancy Morejón and Alberto Rodríguez Tosca, and essays by the theatre critic Vivian Martínez Tabares — but now I’m mostly centered in Argentina.

Q: What attracted you to the work of translating in the first place?  Was this planned, or did you just happen upon it?

A: While living in Madrid for a few years in the 1980s, I hung out with English-speaking artists whose Spanish was fairly rudimentary.  I wanted to share my readings with them, especially a story written by Ignacio Aldecoa, “Un buitre ha hecho su nido en el café,” which was set in a café almost identical to the one we used to frequent, El Café Comercial on the Glorieta de Bilbao, an archetypical Old World café with marble-topped tables and mirror-lined walls.  Looking back, I see that it’s a fairly conventional story, but one aspect really fascinated me — its description of the mise-en-abyme effect of the mirrors.  I really loved figuring out how to carry this over into English as my friends were trying to capture the same effect in their drawings.  Back in the United States, I became more serious about literary translation and took a few workshops while doing my master’s in English at the City College of New York.  Through people I met in the workshop, I became more connected to what seemed back then to be small world of literary translation, with few venues for publication.  Now, almost twenty years later, with the Internet and many new independent publishers and online journals, the landscape has changed completely.

Q: What led you to Chejfec’s work, and how did you come to translate it for Open Letter?

A: I met Sergio at a poetry event in New York a few years ago, not too long after he moved here from Venezuela, where he’d been living since the early 1990s, and we struck up a conversation.  That led to Sergio sending me some of his books, which I read and admired.  It took me a while to ponder the next move, but since I’d done some freelance translation for BOMB magazine, an arts and culture quarterly in New York, I decided to pitch the idea of translating something by Sergio for an upcoming issue.  The editor said sure, we’ll take a look.  My initial idea was to translate a short story, but Sergio had just sent me the manuscript for the as-yet-unpublished Mis dos mundos.  After reading it, I suggested that I translated an excerpt for BOMB, and Sergio agreed.  Open Letter Books came into the picture after the excerpt was published.  I happened to be reading Three Percent, Open Letter’s blog, and Chad Post, the editorial director, was wondering aloud who Sergio Chejfec was.  I emailed him right away and attached the translation, and a few months later we had a contract with Open Letter for My Two Worlds.

Q: This is the first work by Chejfec to be published in English, but he’s been publishing in Spanish to some acclaim for years.  Was there any pressure involved in bringing an established writing to a new audience?  If so, how did you overcome that pressure and move forward?

A: It’s true that Sergio is a well-regarded author in Argentina, but before My Two Worlds came out, I don’t think many English-speaking readers had heard of him, except for specialists in contemporary Latin American literature — something that’s changing, I hope.  The biggest pressure I felt was to do justice to this incredible novel and to deliver it to Open Letter Books in a reasonable amount of times.  It’s fairly short, only 103 pages, but instead of the four to five months I anticipated, the translation took almost a year of steady work.

Q: What were some of the particular challenges of translating Chejfec’s work?

A: What sets Chejfec’s work apart from other fiction I’ve translated is the density and complexity of his sentences.  There’s no coasting along; every sentence demands an intense scrutiny and a parsing through of meanings and possible translations.  When I was working on My Two Worlds, I had to ask Sergio a million questions, to the point where a gloss on the book could be made from the Q&As in the emails that went back and forth

At the same, I noticed how crucial the “little” words were in qualifying the narrator’s ruminations, such as “I can’t be sure” or “anyhow” or “whatever,” the whole panoply of verbal stutters in English that express doubt or hesitation.  Even these formulaic expressions needed to be sorted through and weighed in the English translation.

Q: Some of the pleasures?

A: The biggest one?  That was when I reached a certain moment in the revision and could read long stretches of the novel as a novel, I mean, I could step back and enjoy the scenes as if it were any book I’d just picked up.  You then flash back to an earlier stage when your draft was a mess, full of brackets around those phrases or sentences that resisted translation . . .  So it was utterly gratifying in the end to feel myself being gripped by the story as would any other reader.

And throughout the project, it was a real joy to work with Sergio Chejfec.  As I said, Sergio spent an enormous amount of time answering my questions, either in emails or in person.  I don’t think he ever imagined his novel would be subject to the kind of microscopic scrutiny it underwent.  I asked him once about what it was like to be translated and he said it was like a parable by Kafka; he had to offer his explanation to the Guardian of the Other Language so that the door would open.  If that was the case, I loved my Kafkaesque role in this endeavor!

The response to My Two Worlds has been amazing.  It’s the first translation I’ve done that’s made a perceptible ripple.  Chad Post and the staff at Open Letter Books have done an exceptional job at getting the novel out there to the right readers, and it’s a thrill for me to read reviews or commentaries that quote from the translation itself.

Q: And now, for translating in general, what are some of the particular challenges of translating?

A: When I start a new project I feel as uncertain and hesitant as the narrator in My Two Worlds.  And I never know when I’ve finished a translation.  You can tinker with them endlessly.

Q:  What are some of the pleasures?

A: Working intensively in the English language and discovering again and again that it has all the variety and nuance you need to catch any idiosyncrasy in the language you’re translating from.

Q: When you meet aspiring translators who have yet to begin their first project, what advice do you give?

A: My advice: only translate what you’re enthusiastic about.  Be willing to write an introduction or translator’s note about the author and the work.  You’re often the best person to do this and you’ll also gain visibility as a translator.  If the work isn’t in the public domain, be sure to obtain permission to publish your translation (by contacting the author or his or her publisher).  And send your translation around.

I’m an active member of the PEN Translation Committee at the PEN American Center in New York.  We meet often to discuss general issues concerning the business of translation.  A few resources for translators are available on our webpage at the PEN site, including a recently updated model contract that translators should look at (click here).

The American Literary Translators Association also has a helpful website (click here).

Q: What are some translator’s tools that you cannot work without?

A: On-line resources such as bilingual dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries (OED, el Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, wikipedia, google books) Roget’s thesaurus, Words into Type, Webster’s 3rd (Unabridged), my MacBook Air.

Q: How do you determine what project to work on next?

A: Since translation isn’t my main source of income, I can often decide what I’ll work on.  I’ve also been contacted directly for translation projects, and if I’m not too busy I usually accept them.

Q: And, if it’s not too much to ask, what are you working on next?

A: I have a few translation projects on hold right now, so they’re likely to be the next.  One is to complete the translation of a sequence of poems by Mercedes Roffé.  I’d also like to start writing reviews of books in translation.

More long-term, I’m hoping to do maybe one or two other novels by Sergio, but at present I’m only thinking of short-term projects.  Happily, Sergio’s fans can look forward to seeing two more of his novels, both from Open Letter, in translations by Heather Cleary: The Planets, which will be out in a few months, and The Dark, which will be published next year.

Q: What are some of your favorite authors who work has not yet been published into English?

A: I think my favorite authors have already been translated, at least in part, into English.  But even the most highly-regarded writers have important works yet to be translated.  Most of Virgilo Piñera’s plays, for example, are unknown in English.

I’d also like to see more essays, diaries, letters, and cross-genre works in translation.  The main focus among publishers seems to be fiction and poetry.

Q: Finally, what are three books you’d recommend we all read?

A: In keeping with the theme of translation:

Two books are by the German-born American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, who’s devoted a considerable part of her work to the translation of Edmond Jabès and to the translation and publication of many contemporary French and German innovative poets.  In Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Waldrop reminisces about her long friendship with Jabès and her experiences as his translator.  Her collection of essays Dissonance (if you are interested) also includes many superb pieces on the poetics of translation.

And I recommend Writing Beckett’s Letters by George Craig.  It’s a delightful account of Craig’s meticulous work on transcribing and translating into English the letters written by Samuel Beckett in French, which are published in Volume Two of Cambridge UP’s The Letters of Samuel Beckett.

The work continues!  From Bolaño, in August, we will see Andrew’s translation of The Skating Rink; in 2010, of Monsieur Pain (January), Assassin Whores (June), and The Insufferable Gaucho (August); and in 2011, of The Secret of Evil (November).  All will be published by New Directions (New Directions will also be publishing, in the same general time period, two other Bolaño books — Antwerp (April 2010) and Between Parentheses (June 2011) — translated by Natasha Wimmer, who did exceptional work on Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666).  Besides a translation of Aira’s Varamo (forthcoming), I’m hoping that in the mix there are some more transations of Aira’s books.

I’m pleased that Mr. Andrews has taken the time to respond to some questions about his work as a translator, and in particular as a translator of Bolaño and Aira.  (All typos in the interview are mine — not because I wrote it myself but because I typed it up myself.)

Q:  Mr. Andrews, I’d like to begin by asking about your pathway to your current work translating Roberto Bolaño and César Aira.  How long have you been translating, and why from Spanish?

I studied literature, French and Spanish, at university and started translating in the mid-1990s with travel narratives (including Ana Briongos’ memoir Black on Black about living and travelling in Iran) and some short stories (including Cortázar’s uncollected, early story “The Season of the Hand”).  I wanted to translate longer works of fiction, but it’s hard to get a contract; there’s simply not much work for translators of fiction into English.  With Bolaño, I had a lucky break: I was approaching publishers in England, expressing interest in translating work, and it happened that I visited Christopher Maclehose at The Harvill Press in London shortly after he had acquired the rights to By Night in Chile.  That was in 2001.  He asked me what I had been reading and I spoke enthusiastically about Bolaño (I had just read The Wild Detectives).  Harvill already had a translator lined up for By Night in Chile, but when that fell through, they needed a replacement, so they asked me for a sample, then commissioned me to translate the book.  Barbara Epler at New Directions published By Night in Chile in the United States, and I’ve been working directly with her since Last Evenings on Earth (which was originally commissioned by Harvill but published first by New Directions in the United States).

What happened with Aira was also serendipitous.  New Directions were considering some of his books, and Barbara was asking for opinions.  I had been “converted” by An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (I remember clearly reading it on a tram on a sunny winter’s day in Melbourne and suddenly feeling that I “got it”, after an initial phase of bewilderment, or more precisely realizing that if I stopped trying to “get it” as historically responsible fiction, it would open up as a strange and beautiful blend of phantasmagoria, essay, and narrative poem.  After that, I was hooked and embarked on the treasure hunt that Aira has set up for his readers by publishing his books all over the place, with all sorts of outfits).  So when the chance to translate An Episode and How I Became a Nun came up, I was very keen.

Q:  What attracted you to the work of translating in the first place?

Translating is a very practical, hands-on way of working with literature: taking the sentences apart, puzzling over the bits, and reassembling them; poring over dictionaries and other reference works.  I like trying to think about literature in critical and theoretical ways too, but there’s pleasure in losing the distance that theory requires and losing yourself in the details.

Q:  I have found Bolaño and Aira to be two incredibly different authors, yet authors whose style is part of the product.  In other words, their subject tends to determine the very form they write in.  How do you approach such diverse and complex translating projects?

I think you’re quite right: they are very different, but in both cases style, in the broadest sense, encompassing the organization of a life-work and a working life, is central.  Part of Aira’s style in that broad sense is to keep changing his style at the level of the chapter or paragraph, or rather to keep jumping from genre to genre to genre (Patri’s dream in Ghosts is a clear example of that: it is made up of free-wheeling anthropological reflections, which contrast strongly with the fairly straightforward narration in which the dream is set).  So there are sharp differences within the books as well as between them, which are disorienting for the translator, as for the reader.  When the translator reaches those discontinuities, he or she just has to hang on tight.

Q:  Do you find yourself suffering from translator’s block?

Yes, but it lasts for hours, not days, weeks, or months, and I think it’s quite different from writer’s block.  The problems to be solved are complex, but largely pre-set by the original, whereas a writer has to keep coming up with problems as well as solving them.

Q:  Having translated a handful of works by each author, have certain things become automatic or at least easy?

No.  That hasn’t happened yet!

Q:  Now that we’ve talked about some of the challenges of translating, what are the pleasures?

César Aira has said that for him becoming a writer gave him an excuse to go on reading in the luxurious, irresponsible way that children do.  Translating is a good excuse for reading too, and rereading.  So I’d say that one of the main pleasures of translating is prolonged immersion in interesting fictions.  Handling literary language is a great source of pleasure too.

Q:  What are you working on now?  And, if it doesn’t breach any pact of secrecy, what is coming up?

Right at the moment I’m finishing off Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, before getting on to some more Bolaño stories.  César Aira’s Varamo is coming up after that.

Q:  Who are some of your favorite authors writing in Spanish who have not been translated into English?

I’ll mention two, who are very different from each other.

Dalia Rosetti, from Argentina.  Recently I read her book Me encantaría que me guestes de mí (clumsy translation: I’d love it if you fancied me).  It’s a lesbian surfing romance that jumps into the future.  The labels make it sound like a genre mish-mash, and I guess that’s what it is, but what fascinated me was the falsely naive vitality of the narrative voice, which is cunningly sustained.

Juan Villoro, from Mexico.  His El Testigo (The Witness), about a self-exiled Mexican intellectual returning home after the elections that ended the PRI’s long reign in 2001, is dense, epigrammatic, and built like a palace.  It’s the most ambitious of Villoro’s books to date, but there are many more, in an impressive range of kinds: stories, essays, travel writing, children’s books.

Q:  Do you have a say in what works you will translate?  If so, how do you select your next process?

Generally publishers do the commissioning and translators take the job or don’t.  Publishers often listen to the opinions of translators, or ask them for reader’s reports, but they usually gather a fair few opinions and then they just have to “go on their nerve” as Frank O’Hara said of poets.  When a book is proposed, two main factors influence my decision: (a) Am I in tune with the book? and (b) Can I do it in the publisher’s time frame, given my other commitments?

Q:  Finally, what are three books you recommend we all read?

These aren’t recommendations for everyone, just some things I like and that might appeal to some readers of The Mookse and the Gripes: Anything the Landlord Touches, poems by Emma Lew, from Melbourne (Giramondo Press); A God’s Breakfast, poems by Frank Kuppner, from Glasgow (Carcanet); The Power of Flies, a novel by Lydie Salvayre, from France, translated by Jane Kuntz (Dalkey Archive Press).

I want to thank her for answering these questions!

Q:  I am curious about how the idea for Lark and Termite came to you.  Did the first ideas come after the news of the No Gun Ri massacre/incident broke in 1999?  Was No Gun Ri integrated into an already developing idea?

I have actually been “working” on Lark and Termite, somewhat consciously, for nearly thirty years.  That long ago, I was visiting a high school friend in my hometown; she’d rented a small apartment over a detached garage behind a residential house.  Her window overlooked a grass alley, beautiful, quiet, tire tracks full of white stones or gravel.  Several small houses fronted on the alley.  There was a 1950s style lawn chair, metal, in front of the house just opposite.  In it sat a boy, nine or ten, his legs folded up under him as though he couldn’t feel them; he was holding up to his face a long strip of a blue dry cleaning bag, and blowing on it, looking through it.  He was clearly in his own world.  I asked my friend, “Who is that, and what is he doing?”  “I don’t know,” she said, “but he sits that way for hours.”  The image really burned itself into me. 

Years later, I went to a birthday party hosted by the American artist Mary Sherman—in Cambridge, for her boyfriend, who happened to have the same birthday as me.  I was looking at her sketchbook and admired a particular drawing, and because it was my birthday, she ripped the page out and gave it to me.  The drawing is the one that appears in the American edition of Lark and Termite, opposite the title page.  She had written “Termite” across the top, with some illegible writing; the drawing reminded me so of the boy, and he became Termite in my mind at that time.  I wasn’t really thinking of a book, but I carried the drawing, framed, around with me, moving it house to house. 

The novel began with my question of so long ago, and incorporated birthdays as part of its mystery.  Lark’s first words, first section, were the beginning, and she begins with the chair, the alley, the town; she says who Termite is, what he’s like, what she knows and doesn’t know.  I consciously set the book in 1959 so that he would not be “diagnosed,” labeled, figured out.  The chair I originally saw suggested that time, and the silence.  Lark tells us that his father was killed in Korea, which was the war of the 50s, and she tells us they “never got his body back.”  She goes on to describe how Termite loves big sounds, storms, the double railroad tunnel by the river, when the trains go over on the tracks above, the train yard.  I had a strong sense of the look of the tunnel, which is a common sight in West Virginia—those stone structures, bridges, tunnels, built during the Depression by the WPA.

This novel was kismet from the beginning.  I had written at least Lark’s and Nonie’s first sections of the book before September 1999, when the AP broke the story of No Gun Ri.  A large color photo on the front page showed the tunnel, from above, over the should of a survivor in a pale pink suit.  I just wish I could meet that woman some day.  At any rate, I recognized the shape, the space, the tunnel, immediately, and knew that was what happened to Leavitt, Termite’s father.  The parallel worlds of the book began building and layering.

Q:  In my review I make note of what looked like the obvious influence of William Faulkner, particularly his The Sound and the Fury, whose elements—the overlapping narratives, the sound and the fury going on in Termite’s inert body—you use in your own unique way.  What other authors do you feel influenced by?

James Agee.  Katherine Anne Porter.  McCullers.  Authors who articulate childhood, time, from deep inside.

Q:  Your last novel,MotherKind, was published in 2000.  Did writing Lark and Termite, published nine years later, take longer to write than your other novels?  Was writing it a particular challenge?

Each novel is a particular challenge in its own way.  I blame my constant multi-tasking, and it’s true that I can’t write if there are other things to be done—but, in some way, I write the way I do because I live with the material of the books for so long.  They become alternate worlds, and they must be compelling enough that I can come back to them, despite time and distraction, trauma, loss, life (!) in its goodness as well—and sometimes the distance even seems to solve problems, or advance my understanding, when I enter the book again.  It’s always been five to nine years between books for me. 

The challenge with this one was the immense problem of all it encompasses, sustaining parallel worlds, really through language and mystery.  Language is, I think, a layered mystery that encompasses history, and dimensions beyond the physical.  Language is consciousness itself, which, like music, prayer, thought, is more than physical, and bridges time.

Q:  On your website you have a page called “The Secret Country” which contains many photographs, letters, and other items from various time periods in which your books are set.  In Lark and Termiteyou begin each day’s section with a picture from a variety of angles of the bridge at No Gun Ri.  What role do these visual elements play in your writing?

I often build up a sort of artifact collection around the book I’m writing, private things that help me hang on to the work, enter the work, get inside the world that is still unknown to me.  Some of the photographs on the website I discovered in hindsight.  For Lark and Termite, I had a movie that I took, many years later, of the alley—it looked exactly the same, except that the house where he lived was gone, replaced by a garden. 

And when I was researching No Gun Ri, I depended heavily on the AP series, which won a Pulitzer for Martha Mendoza, Charles Hanley, and Sang-Hun Choe, and did further reaserach—including emailing various travel book companies.  Robert Nilsen, a writer for Sun Moon guide books, happened to be in South Korea when I reached him, and he generously volunteered to go to the tunnel and photograph it for me.  The black and white, cropped versions, the color translated to black and white, are the photographs he sent me, and allowed us to use in the novel.  They get tighter as we enter into Leavitt’s mind, into what’s happening to everyone in the tunnels.  The post cards of Main Street (that Lark collects), the small moon pitcher Termite loves, are all things, real things, that were part of the process.

Q:  You are also an acclaimed short story writer.  Your first compilation, Sweathearts, was published in 1976, followed by another, Counting in 1978, and then Black Ticket in 1979.  Since then you’ve written five novels, interspersed with collections of short stories.  Is there a different sense of fulfillment when completing a novel than when completing a short story?

Well, yes, if only because a novel has to be sustained over such a long period, and the arc is so much longer and more complex.  I loved writing stories, but I feel as though my stories and poems are inside my novels.  I often publish excerpts along the way, that work as stories or focused excerpts.  My books are mysteries to me—for me, material dictates form, meaning that the material teaches me how to write the book, what form the book will take.

Q:  Has your work become more focused on novels?

If ind that the novel, as I conceive of it and write it, gives me the long arc of time I need in order to really enter the work.  I want that long, familial form—which is never a given, and always a gamble.

Q:  This might not be a fair question, but what is your favorite short story you’ve written?

I don’t play favorites!  To me, the work is a continuum.  Everything I’ve written had to precede what came next.  It is one body of work.

Q:  What are some of your favorite short stories?

“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” comes to mind, as perfection in itself, but there are dozens of stories I love.

Q:  This book was set in your native West Virginia.  Now that you are the director of the MFA program at Rutgers Newark, can we New Jersey residents hope to see a book set in or around this area?

Hmmmm, well, in some way, perhaps.  Perhaps when I write my “academic” novel!

Q:  And finally, what are three novels that you recommend we all read?

Here are four.  You’ll love them.  I live by them.

• A Death in the Familyby James Agee
• They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
• Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
• Fat City by Leonard Gardner

Free copy courtesy of Imran Ahmad and Dovegreyreader.

The subtitle to Ahmad’s memoir is “A Muslim Boy Meets the West.”  As is the case with many memoirs, it begins before the beginning by describing his ancestry on both his father’s and mother’s side.  However, unlike most memoirists, Ahmad quickly lets his reader know that his memoir won’t be one of longwinded reflection:

My mother’s family and my father’s family were from the same village in India but, in the chaos and insanity of Partition, they headed in different directions.  I could describe those events and years of separation in heartrending, excruciating six-hundred-page detail, but this is not that kind of book.  (This story will proceed mercifully briskly and you will not be tortured along the way.)  Suffice it to say that, eventually, both families ended up in Karachi, the capital of West Pakistan.

And Ahmad makes good on his promise.  The pre-Imran years are not touched upon again and we move at a steady pace through the first twenty-five years of his life.  We begin in Pakistan, but by the time he was two, Ahmad’s family moved to England.  There, early in his life, the innocent young boy experiences prejudice and humiliation, but at this point he is too young to understand it well.  It’s enough that some injustice is done.  It is also here that we get a sense of the humorous aspect of the book:

This wasn’t always due to lack of money.  Accommodation was hard to come by for Pakistanis.  Although many people in London were renting out rooms, some had signs which read ‘No Irish or Coloureds’.  The more liberal-minded ones had signs which read ‘No Coloureds’.

It is interesting to note that the memoir is entirely in the present tense (other than the brief introduction quoted above), allowing Ahmad to mimic both the voice and the absolute certainty or confusion of a young man (“I know where babies come from.  I understand the principles of reproduction; I have it figured out.  Being ‘married’ induces a psychological change in the woman.  Since the mind and body are closely linked, the mind triggers off a process in the woman’s body which causes the development and birth of a baby.  I’m not sure where the baby comes out, but it happens at the hospital.”).  This also allows Ahmad to express his own prejudices in absolute terms without the cumberson apologies of an interjecting author (“We are able to converse, although I look down on him because of his Northern accent.”).  As the story progresses and Ahmad grows up, the certainty begins to slip away as he grapples with his identity, his religion, his relationships with others.  As a reader, I felt like I was witnessing my own growth. 

And that’s one of the best things about this book.  The reader - any reader – can relate to Ahmad’s childhood, adolescence, and first steps into adulthood.  With a unique voice, Ahmad speaks of universal feelings.  All the better then, that one of the objectives of the book is to get people from different sides of the world to relate to one another.  Here a Muslim boy wrestles with the idea of Christianity while reading James Bond.  He responds in confusion to injustice on each side of the world and succeeds in putting a human face on each side of the world at the same time.

I’m pleased that Imran Ahmad has agreed to answer a few questions for me to post with this review.  On to that, then; he’ll be able to tell more about this excellent book in his own words:

Q:  You mentioned to me that you wrote this book with an American audience in mind, though the book describes in detail your experiences growing up in Great Britain: your interacting with British schools, British culture, and - though universal - the prejudice you experienced in Britain.  We come to find out in your book that you eventually spend several years working in America.  Why did you choose to write to Americans about the portion of your life spent in Britain and not the portion spent in America?  (I ask this question fully aware of how well it reinforces Horace Engdahl’s comments about the insularity of American readers.)

There is a story behind this.  I originally wrote a book which covered the 42 years of my life, including those living in the United States (and America remained an important part of my life thereafter).  I couldn’t get any agent or publisher to consider this manuscript, so eventually I self-published it, as The Path Unimagined.  This book had great feedback in some quarters – but it was completely ignored by the media.  But I had a lucky break (one of many).  The Head Buyer of Waterstone’s – Britain’s biggest bookstore chain – said he couldn’t stock a book which was so obviously self-published, but it had wonderful content and deserved a ‘proper publisher’.  He sent it to a literary agent, who took me on as a client, and I shut down the self-published book. 

The agent loved the first 25 years of the book, but said that the rest needed more work and material to make it as funny and compelling.  So, I ended up with a three book project. 

Unimagined is the first book, and covers school, university and my first year of work.  It has an interesting structure (which continues in the other books).  In England – and at the University of Stirling in Scotland, which I attended – the academic year begins in early September, which coincides with my birthday (September 13).  So each chapter of the book corresponds to one year of my life, beginning with my birthday and the new class, and ending with the summer vacation.

More Unimagined (2009, I hope) continues with my career and all the years living in America.  This book ends on the day of 9/11, which fits perfectly with the chapter structure.  The final book of the trilogy is (again) called The Path Unimagined, (planned for 2010) and continues from immediately after 9/11. 

Throughout the books, America is a theme – because it’s been such an important part of my life (I guess you may take America for granted if you actually are an American).  It features less in Unimagined, because I’m not actually living there (although I do visit Disney World!), but my growing perception of America as I grow up is very important.  There are so many exciting things about America, and so many contradictions.  I begin to have a glimmering of understanding that America isn’t clear and simple, that the world isn’t black and white. 

Unimagined is written for an American audience – because I know where the story is going – but of course it deals with growing up in England, visiting Pakistan, and attending university in Scotland.  This growing up story, I have been told by many people, is universally resonant – regardless of the background, religion, ethnicity, and even gender, of the reader. 

The original self-published book was written in American English, but I had to undo this for Unimagined, as my publisher is British.  I wrote the UK version carefully, so that it would still make sense to ‘my American readers’ (whom I even refer to at the very beginning).  I also discovered that the American readership most likely to read Unimagined would actually prefer the authentic British tone.  (Once you understand that ‘pavement’ means ‘sidewalk’, you’re all set.  But just in case, I have put a short glossary of terms on my US page.) 

So the Unimagined trilogy is written by me with America in mind – a country for who’s people (but not necessarily its Administration and television media) I have the greatest affection and respect.  It is easy to respect a country which enshrines every individual’s right to pursue their personal happiness in its Constitution.  I am not aware of any other country which does this, certainly not any so-called Islamic country – where there is no concept of personal happiness, only of cultural and tribal constraints, and honor-bound duties (especially for women). 

When I first approached American publishers, they all turned down Unimagined, because it had ‘no angle’ – ie I did not become a terrorist, so why would anyone be interested?  So my British publisher has been exporting copies to the US.  The only issue with having a British publisher is that they are struggling to meet demand in the US, so I am again actively looking for an American publisher – in light of the acclaim that Unimagined has received – to take on this project in the US and Canada.  If I get an American publisher, I‘m going to do a US book tour by road – what a dream-come-true that would be!

Q:  You write this book in the present tense, allowing your younger self to express his feelings in absolute terms and without the interference of blatant authorial hindsight.  At the same time, I imagine this choice of perspective can be limiting.  Why did you choose to portray these years in this manner?

I very much wanted the reader to experience my journey – my thoughts, feelings, emotions, hopes, fears, prejudices and misconceptions – exactly as I experienced them.  I believe that these are most readily conveyed by relating events ‘in the moment’.  It ensures that the narrative is a story, a journey, rather than an essay.  It also helps the reader to understand exactly why I was thinking what I was thinking, because s/he has been led through the same thought process. 

In just a couple of places, I cheat and briefly place some future event or insight in brackets, where it’s extremely pertinent and contributes to the story. 

Readers have said that I have very successfully matched the maturity of the narrative voice to the narrator’s actual age at the time of the events being related.  Obviously, over the decades I become somewhat more mature in my voice, especially once I’ve figured a few things out (like sex). 

Actually, this wasn’t as hard as people imagine.  Rather than writing a continuous story of everything that ever happened to me, I have written a series of vignettes about events which I remember vividly.  These vignettes are placed in chronological order, without any filling in-between.  I believe that the reader is smart enough to figure out what is going on and doesn’t need ‘packing material’ between meaningful events. As I say on the first page: ‘This story will proceed mercifully briskly and you will not be tortured along the way.’  (That’s one of the future insights, shown in brackets.)

Writing these vignettes was very easy, because they were already written in my head.  Or rather, I should say that typing them was easy.  You see, whenever anything significant happened (or happens) in my life, I could (or can) hear a detached observer inside my head, who is already writing down the event.  All of these events were stored away in my head, already written.  All I had to do was to type them out.  It was only a question of when I would get around to doing it.  I kept putting it off, because I thought that writing a book would be a huge burden of work, whereas in fact it was a joyful journey. 

People have commented on how vividly I remember things.  I thought that was normal.  I didn’t realise that not everyone has such vivid recollections.  I have to emphasize that I don’t necessarily remember the precise dates of these events – I have pieced together the chronology by what I can see in the visual memory (for example, who the teacher was).  Or I have used the Internet to conduct research to figure it out.  For example, I remember clearly that copy of Life magazine arriving in the mail with the front cover feature ‘One Week’s Dead’  (about the Vietnam War) and it being on the coffee table, but I had to research when that actually was. 

Another aspect of the writing process is that I did not write in chronological order.  I just wrote whatever event I felt like writing about at any particular time and then placed it in the correct position in the Word document.  So the writing was never a chore.  It was always enjoyable to write, and I hope that this means it is enjoyable to read.  I firmly believe that writing and reading should not be torture!

Q:  Obviously most of us have already missed out on the opportunity to read your prize-winning science fiction story written when you were 14.  In the future, can we expect to be treated to some of your fiction?

First of all, that science fiction short story wasn’t so great.  It’s just that the kind of audience which that Saturday morning TV program attracted were not very bright and only semi-literate.  (I explain why I was watching in the book.)  So any story sent in with correct spelling and grammar would easily lead the way in the competition. 

I’ve heard it said that you should write about what you know.  Now, I would love to write bestselling Dan Brown-style books about secret government organizations, ancient conspiracies and political intrigue.  But I really don’t know anything about these, and my voice would have no authenticity, no credibility.

I am no good at making up stories – I find it very hard to create a plot.  But I have a huge set of life experiences which make a good story, and I’ve only just embarked on the road of narrating them.  I write mosaic style (in pieces, out of sequence) and, because it’s all true, there’s no continuity issue.

Some of the events described in the Unimagined trilogy are extraordinary.  So much so that, if they were fiction, any publisher would reject them, saying that they were ‘implausible’ or ‘unpalatable coincidences’. 

If I ever run out of life experiences to write about, then it would be great to write fiction.  We shall see.

Q:  I don’t want to spoil the ending of your book by asking questions about what has happened since, but Unimagined does – with the exception of the two-page epilogue - end in the mid-1980s.  Can you briefly explain what has happened since then that made you want to write this book?

I should just explain something about the ending.  Unimagined ends at age 25, and then there is a brief epilogue in which I’m returning to London at age 37, after living for some years in America.  The purpose of the epilogue is to bring to conclusion the thread about the Jaguar XJS, and to give the reader a glimpse into the future.  The Jaguar XJS is such an excellent metaphor for other themes in Unimagined, I felt it needed a proper ending in the same book. 

Some readers are worried about the missing years between 25 and 37, but there won’t be any.  More Unimagined will resume the story at age 25. 

So, briefly, I started my corporate career in Finance in Unilever, transitioned to management consulting (about Oracle systems) and was sent to Minneapolis on a business assignment.  The client decided to hire me and offered me a job – relocating me lock, stock and barrel to Minneapolis.  I ended-up working for Ernst & Young Management Consulting and travelled all over the US – living the American dream – before being seduced into a smaller company (Whittman-Hart, later renamed marchFIRST) for apparently huge stock options.  These were a mirage and the dot.com crash made things even more desperate.  But, miraculously, I was offered a position with General Electric, which brought me back to London in 2000 – but still working closely with the US (and Europe and India).  So, America remained an integral part of my life. 

I have had a number of intriguing (and in some cases, life-altering) experiences which have changed my perspective in an unimagined way.  Amongst these there’s also the gut-wrenching issue of 9/11.  Of course, much has been written about this, so I’ll just pick out a couple of personal threads. 

One issue which really concerned me was how dehumanizing 9/11 was, and how readily people fell into tribal positions over it (which is exactly what groups like Al-Qaeda want).  I don’t believe that there are actually discrete entities called ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ which are diametrically opposed to each other.  If you live in ‘the West’, you know that it exists over a huge spectrum of cultures, ethnicities, beliefs, and politics.  The same also applies to the Islamic world, and there is considerable overlap between the two.  You have to be completely inexperienced with one of these sides to be able to view it as a singular entity – but unfortunately many people are completely ignorant of the ‘other side’. 

Some elements would have us believe that ‘the West’ is entirely imperialist, hedonistic, debaucherous and immoral, and that the only acceptable path is joyless, mediaeval Puritanism.  Of course, neither of these extremes is true, and we must all find our own comfortable, middle ground – and should be free to do so. 

9/11, unfortunately, drove too many people to extreme positions.  Some of the material being written on Internet boards (like AOL and Yahoo!) was vile – and could be read from anywhere in the world, thus fuelling the hatred. 

For a Muslim, the rock-and-hard-place dilemma was: if we were expected to condemn 9/11 more than everyone else, then that actually created a connection between us and the 19 terrorists, whereas I personally did not feel I had anything in common with them, and they had nothing in common with my Islam.  Bin Laden’s goals are actually personal and political (he hates the Al-Sauds, because they did not show him any respect for his incredible achievement of driving the god-less Soviets out of Afghanistan), but when you invoke religion, millions of people immediately suspend all cognitive brain activity and jump on your bandwagon.  (It works every time: ‘the West is waging a war on Islam!’ and ‘Jesus opposes stem cell research!’)

This dehumanization and simple black-and-white categorization troubled me greatly, and I wrote Unimagined as a re-humanizing book (of both ‘sides’). 

On a really personal level, I had become a Platinum frequent flyer, and really enjoyed travelling around America.  On visiting the US just about five weeks after 9/11, what I noticed most was how quiet the airports were.  My only negative experience was on a small 6am flight from White Plains to Atlanta.  Despite the fact that the aircraft had only about ten passengers, I had been placed next to someone.  Once everyone was aboard, I moved across from my aisle seat to a pair of empty seats by a window.  I heard the flight attendant immediately inform the pilot, who looked back at me, but didn’t do anything.  I didn’t blame anyone for any of this (except the 9/11 terrorists), but I felt slightly hurt.  The elevated level of fear was understandable.

It was a year later that things changed dramatically, when Alien Special Registration was introduced for all males, between the ages of 18 and 45, from certain countries of origin.  On my 72^nd arrival into the United States, I was sent to INS Secondary Inspection, for the first time ever.  This delay was about two hours.  I’ve been sent there a number of times since.  I can fully understand the reasoning behind this, but a part of me is always thinking: “But America, it’s me!” 

I have to say, I personally have always found INS officers to be extremely courteous and respectful to me; even the ones sending me to Secondary have been apologetic.   (Except for one who was a little bit abrupt – but he was also abrupt to the white French man in front of me.  Muslims and French people – known enemies of America?) 

Whilst I love America, I have been greatly troubled by some of the actions of the Cheney Administration since 9/11 – actions which I feel are exploitative and contrary to American values, (and frankly, contrary to American interests).  These have contributed significantly to the mutual dehumanization. 

Oh, did you say ‘briefly’? …

Q:  While managing to keep the memoir focused on your experiences and thoughts, you weave short discussions of world events from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s that seem to emphasize your themes while showing your growing individual awareness.  What role do these and current events play in your book, and what should readers take away from your book when they return to watching the news?

The world situation is a complex, tangled web, with many long strands going back centuries.  Anyone who simplifies it into a black-and-white, ‘us and them’ situation is either very stupid or very ruthless.  Our geo-political situation didn’t just occur spontaneously. 

The reason there is a theocratic regime in Iran today is because the US installed and supported the brutal, authoritarian Shah – who tortured pro-Democracy opponents – and the only opposition movement which could gain enough critical mass to overthrow him was the one based on religion.  And then the US (and other Western countries) gave support to Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran and the subsequent brutal eight-year war.  No wonder there is so much bad feeling, when the natural state between Iran and the US should be one of warmth.  I see the US-Iran tension as one of bruised egos and simmering resentment – so the more that the US tells Iran not to do something, the more Iran is going to do it (simple schoolyard psychology).  A lot of re-humanization and forgiveness needs to take place to normalize relations. 

The reason Afghanistan is in such a sorry state is that we (the West and Pakistan) created the modern concept of Jihad to rally volunteers to drive the Soviets out.  (I’m not aware of suicide bombing being a technique used in the anti-Soviet Jihad –  that appears to be a later innovation, viable only when you can find broken people who feel they have nothing left to lose).  We supplied the Mujahideen with weaponry and training and those amazing Stinger missiles.  I imagine that once you’ve become accustomed to firing Stinger missiles at helicopter gunships – what a high that must give! – then returning to agriculture or construction must seem somewhat dull.  Unfortunately, we abandoned Afghanistan to implode once the Soviets were gone – the Mujahideen started fighting each other, and the Taliban won.  The shocking thought that occurred to me recently was:  Maybe the Soviets were the best government that Afghanistan has had in recent times?  At least they were committed to women’s education and rights.  I never imagined that I would ever think such a thought!  

We don’t just come to understand the world in a sudden burst of enlightenment (I mean the geo-political world, not the metaphysical one).  We pick up threads and it dawns on us gradually. 

Since Unimagined is a personal and authentic journey, it has many strands and some of these concern the external world.  As I said earlier, I wanted the reader to be ‘in the moment’ with me and have my understanding at that point in time.  My knowledge of the world came slowly (and is still developing, of course) as I picked up little bits of information and heard about events along the way: Vietnam war, moon landings, India-Pakistan war, Munich Olympics, oil-rich Arabs, Margaret Thatcher, Iranian Revolution and so on. 

There’s also a risk of events being forgotten, so I wanted to remind the reader of some of those which have shaped today’s world.  I had a very nice letter recently from Jimmy Carter, thanking me for the copy of Unimagined which I had sent him.  I mentioned this letter to a younger co-worker, and she said, ‘Who’s Jimmy Carter?’  Well, she was just a haploid cell during his Presidency.

References to historical events also serve to give the narrative its place in time, when so much has changed so quickly.  We need to remember that e-mail and the Internet have been with us for such a short time.  The concept of having instant and free communication with someone thousands of miles away was unimagined for most of my lifetime.

Q:  Besides Jimmy Carter, did you send Unimagined to any other famous Americans?

Unimagined is primarily a re-humanizing book, and therefore I think Oprah would appreciate it and might be willing to bring it to a wider audience. So I sent her a few copies, and I wrote to some of the people around the world who have sent me wonderful e-mails about Unimagined, and I asked them if they wouldn’t mind encouraging Oprah to give it a try (using the Contact Us page on Oprah.com).  We shall see what happens. 

I sent a copy to Barack Obama, months before he was nominated, with the inscription: ‘Barack, The world is desperate for change.  America must lead the way.  I hope you lead America.  Best wishes, Imran Ahmad’ 

Shortly after this, all I heard him start talking about was change, change, change. 

Q:  And finally, what are three books you recommend we all read?

Well, the first three books which come to mind are: Unimagined, More Unimagined and The Path Unimagined.   Oh wait … I get it … this part’s not about me. 

Well, I’m still going to cheat and mention three sets of books. 

Firstly, the final trilogy of James Bond novels by Ian Fleming: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (in which Jame Bond falls in love and gets married and widowed); You Only Live Twice (in which he seeks vengeance at all costs, and falls into the hands of the KGB); The Man With the Golden Gun (in which, brainwashed, he tries to kill his boss and, after recovery, is sent away on a mission which M hopes will be the end of him). 

I have always felt that Ian Fleming was a storytelling genius.  These books cost me my place in medical school – they were compelling, I couldn’t stop reading them, when I was supposed to be preparing for high school exams (anyway, I hated the subjects I was allegedly studying).  Fleming had the writing process perfected: vacation home in Jamaica; 1,000 words and snorkelling in the morning; lunch; 1,000 words and snorkelling in the afternoon; leisurely cocktails and dinner in the evening; book completed in less than two months.  To be fair, he was writing on a manual typewriter and it is easy for us to forget how much more convenient the mechanics of writing have become. 

Secondly, the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman.  Quite apart from being an entertaining story, there are many levels of meaning in this epic, and I don’t think I’ve even begun to unravel them all. 

Thirdly, the Eckhart Tolle books: The Power of Now and A New Earth.  I listened to the audio version of The Power of Now on a long haul flight to Australia.  It was a surreal experience.  A New Earth has so many insights which make perfect sense, it has completely changed my perspective.  I think that I now understand, and am learning to moderate, my conditioned responses to what I perceive as negative events.  Is that so?

There is actually a process of evolution across these books: from the simple days of James Bond, through the exploration of mythical beliefs in His Dark Materials,  to the enlightened Consciousness of the Eckhart Tolle books. 

Now, if only entire tribes and nations could let go of the pain of their collective Past. 

You can visit Imran Ahmad’s website at www.unimagined.co.uk.